Blog #4: Problems with "the White Slave"

The Seamstress; or, the White Slave of England is a jarring title for a reader today, with the experience of nonwhite slaves being appropriated to metaphorically represent the life of a poor white Englishwoman. In using the term “white slave,” George W.M. Reynolds exploits the history of nonwhite slaves, as they become absent referents throughout the text. Carol J. Adams[1] describes the metaphorical absent referent as “anything whose original meaning is undercut as it is absorbed into a different hierarchy of meaning…Some terms are so powerfully specific to one group’s oppression [i.e. “slave”] that their appropriation to others is potentially exploitative” (42, 43). By insisting on the word “slave” in The Seamstress, Reynolds uses the experience of one group to provoke sympathy for another, but the original oppressed group gets lost in the process. Thus, in an attempt to expose one type of violence, Reynolds commits a rhetorical violence against others.

In the title and throughout the text, the understanding of the plight of the nonwhite slave is used to provoke sympathy for Virginia Mordaunt’s desperate social positioning. Julia Barnet is the first to explicitly note to Virginia her slave status under the control of Mrs. Jackson (6.20). Later, the sordidness of Virginia’s slave-like employment with Mssrs. Aaron and Sons is even more vividly drawn: “Its [Mssrs. Aaron and Sons] foundations are built with the bones of the white slaves of England, male and female: the skeletons of journeyman tailors and poor seamstresses, all starved to death, constitute the door-posts and the window-frames;—the walls are made of skulls—the architectural devices are cross-bones—and the whole is cemented firmly and solidly by the blood, pith, and marrow of the miserable wretches who are forced to sell themselves in the Slave-Market of British Labour” (27.77). One would assume that “the white slaves of England” would have greater choice than their nonwhite counterparts, but Reynolds is at pains throughout the text to emphasize the actual lack of choice in the condition of the former, for agency no longer really exists when people are only able to choose between two horrendous options. For Virginia, her only choice is between working herself to death as a seamstress or being a prostitute, which we can presume would also not end well, not to mention the moral sacrifices that would have to be made in that career. So the poor are “forced to sell themselves,” the invariable result of which is death, made all the more horrific because it is the destruction of this one group of people that builds the success of another (very much like slave labor). By highlighting the lack of escape and extreme victimization of the workers, the novel indicts all those who would blindly benefit from this corrupt system and creates sympathy for those who suffer at its hands.   

The novel really seems to privilege looking beyond one’s own self-interest to see the struggles of others. So, for example, in a novel that rivals a good revenge tragedy for the number of deaths at the conclusion, Lady Mary and the Earl of Mostyndale are allowed to both survive and receive an authorial blessing at the end of the text, all because they offered sympathy to others: “little as we like the British Aristocracy generally, we nevertheless record our fervid hope that all possible happiness will await that excellent lady and her generous-minded husband” (43.111). This extension of sympathy, however, does not seem to include nonwhite slaves, who are left as the absent referent in the title and throughout the text. Ultimately, the comparison of Virginia Mordaunt and other desperately poor members of the British lower class to nonwhite slaves is not completely unwarranted, because there is (at least to an extent) a shared experience of being stripped of agency and violently exploited for the gain of others. The problem with Reynolds’ text is that he is not making a comparison, but rather taking advantage of the reader’s sympathetic understanding of one term, “slave,” to focus the conversation on an entirely different group. As Adams states, “the absent referent, because of its absence, prevents our experiencing connections between oppressed groups” (45). By keeping the nonwhite slave absent in his text, Reynolds does not make a much-needed connection (at least necessary if he is going to employ the term “slave”), and thus fails to properly look outward at the lives of marginalized peoples in the way that the text supposedly values.

---

[1] This definition is from Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat. While the term “absent referent” certainly did not originate with Adams and she is actually talking about animals being the absent referent in conversations about violence towards women (“she was treated like a piece of meat”) and vice versa (“the rape of animals”), I still feel that her discussion of this metaphorical exploitation is both accessible and applicable to what Reynolds is doing in The Seamstress. However, if anyone could point me in the direction of a more directly relevant discussion of this (or a like) term, I would appreciate it.